Felipe Calderón Biography

Felipe Calderón (born 1962), candidate of the conservative
Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, known by the
acronym PAN), was elected president of Mexico in July of 2006, after a
bitter campaign whose almost-deadlocked result was contested and
protested for months after the vote took place. At 44, Calderón
was one of the youngest presidents in Mexican history.

Supporters of Calderón's chief rival, leftist Mexico City
mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, painted Calderón
as the candidate of Mexico's corporate elites and as a child of
privilege out of touch with the aspirations of the country's poor.
Calderón responded that the free market economic policies he
proposed would be the most effective in alleviating poverty. Whatever the
merits of each position in the economic debate, the portrayal of
Calderón as a scion of elite power was not entirely accurate. For
he was a member of a political family that had helped bring modern
democracy itself to Mexico.

Born into Politically Active Family

Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa was born in Morelia, the
capital of the Mexican state of Michoacán, on August 18, 1962. His
father, Luis Calderón Vega, was a key backer of the

PAN in the early days after its formation in 1939. "His role was
important because he was a student activist, a gentleman, a novelist, a
historian, a political crusader, and a devout Christian," wrote
historian Donald J. Mabry in his article "Father of a Mexican
President: Luis Calderón Vega." He later became the
PAN's official historian. At the time of the PAN's founding,
and for many years afterward, Mexico was under the virtual one-party rule
of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary
Party, or PRI), descended from some of the groups that had overthrown
Mexico's dictatorship in the 1910s and founded the modern Mexican
state. The elder Calderón was one of the activists who first began
to chip away at the PRI's influence, running hopelessly outgunned
candidates in local elections and laying the ideological foundations to
attract the next generation of voters. PAN victories were few in the early
years, but, party member Luis Meija Guzmán told Jeremy Schwartz of
the
Austin American-Statesman
, "Even after they lost, they would continue fighting, until little
by little they moved up the ladder." When Calderón was born,
his parents were both working on a gubernatorial campaign in
Michoacán. The family lived in a modest house and drove used cars.

The political atmosphere rubbed off. Calderón passed out political
leaflets and grew up with the sound of campaigns in his ears. His local
education occurred in a school run by the Catholic Marist Order, which he
attended on a scholarship. When Calderón was 12, a teacher had his
class recite their career plans. "We all said normal jobs, but
Felipe surprised us all," classmate Alma Delia Álvarez
Zamudio told Marc Lacey of the
New York Times
. "He said it like he knew it was going to happen. He said,
'presidente de la república'"—president
of the republic. Calderón was a serious student, not just dreaming
of a political career but aiming toward it. Three of his four siblings
also entered politics.

The political philosophy into which the young Calderón grew cannot
be easily classified according to the modern standards of conservative or
liberal. The PAN was, and remains, closely identified with the Catholic
Church, whose influence the PRI had historically sought to circumscribe
through the maintenance of a strong separation between church and state.
Calderón's stances on social issues such as abortion (which
is legal in Mexico only in cases of rape or danger to the mother's
life) and homosexuality would line up with the PAN's consistently
traditionalist and conservative outlook. On economic questions, however,
Luis Calderón Vega was influenced by Catholic teachings on social
justice, rejecting both Marxism and contemporary capitalist thought. He
believed that wealth should be shared across the levels of society, and
that, in Mabry's words, "each human existed within a larger
social context, never in isolation." In 1981 he left the party he
had helped build, believing that it had shifted too far to the right.

Felipe Calderón and his siblings grew up more conservative than
their father, emphasizing individualist and entrepreneurial philosophies.
In Mabry's words, Calderón "believed that the best
public policy was to take care of the rich because wealth trickles down
and the government should enforce conservative and reactionary
Catholicism." On the campaign trail, however, Calderón
affirmed his support for Mexico's traditional separation of church
and state. "I'm a bad Catholic," he was quoted as
saying by Dudley Althaus of the
Houston Chronicle
. "I appreciate the values my parents instilled in me, but for me
religion and politics are completely distinct things. In Mexico there
should be a secular government that respects without discrimination all
religions."

Earned Law and Economics Degrees

After leaving Morelia, Calderón pursued a rigorous educational
course that would equip him either for a career in politics or one at the
top of Mexico's corporate world. He received his bachelor's
degree in law from the Escuela Libre de Derecho (Free Law School), a
private college in Mexico City, and went on for a master's degree
in economics from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de
México (Autonomous Technology University of Mexico, or ITAM), also
located in the capital. He went on to earn a second master's
degree, this one in public administration, from Harvard
University's Kennedy School of Government in Massachusetts in 1999.

By that time Calderón's political career was already well
underway. He entered politics at the age of 26, with a successful run for
Mexico City's municipal assembly in 1988. Three years later he won
a seat in Mexico's Congress. These campaigns had significance for
Calderón on a personal level: he met Congresswoman and fellow PAN
activist Margarita Zavala and proposed to her during a 1994 campaign
swing. She accepted, and the couple have raised three children in their
Mexico City home. In 1995 Calderón
returned to Michoacán to run for the state governorship under the
PAN banner, but lost.

His loss was no surprise, for at that point the PAN and the leftist
Partido de Revolución Democrática (Party of Democratic
Revolution, or PRD) had just began to crack the PRI's stranglehold
on Mexico's federal and regional offices. For decades PAN
organizers (Calderón among them—he took his first party post
at 26, as head of its youth wing) had tried to ensure open elections with
a level playing field free of the often corrupt influence of the PRI and
its huge patronage machine; Calderón himself rounded up
neighborhood children to act as poll watchers. In the late 1990s, however,
the PRI's hold on power began to crack as several state
governorships fell to the PAN. Calderón, meanwhile, was rising
through the party ranks, having become its secretary-general in 1993 and
party president from 1996 through 1999.

When the PAN's Vicente Fox was elected to the presidency in 2000,
becoming the first Mexican president in 71 years who was not a member of
the PRI, Calderón ascended to the inner circle of power in Mexican
politics. He was rewarded for his long years of work in the political
trenches with the post of director of the Banco Nacional de Obras y
Servicios Públicos (National Bank of Public Works and Services,
known as Banobras), a government-owned bank that financed development
projects. In 2002 he became energy secretary in the Fox administration,
overseeing the Mexican federal government's vast energy
infrastructure. During the 2006 presidential campaign,
Calderón's opponents charged that he had used the post to
direct contracts toward a company owned by his brother-in-law—a
charge that Calderón, who had cultivated a clean-government image,
strenuously denied.

Defeated PAN Rival for Nomination

Calderón's own political ambitions were clear, and in 2004
he resigned his post as energy secretary in order to enter the campaign to
succeed Fox as president. In order to secure the party's nomination
he had to get by Fox's first choice, Santiago Creel.
Calderón's deep roots in the PAN organization proved
decisive in primaries open to PAN members only, however, and he was
nominated to face López Obrador and PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo
in the 2006 election.

The race quickly turned into a two-man contest between López
Obrador and Calderón, who campaigned on a platform of free trade
and a flat tax structure that, he contended, would stimulate investment.
For much of the campaign, López Obrador led in the polls. From
Calderón's point of view, the problem was what some
observers considered his lack of charisma in the new rough-and-tumble
world of Mexican campaigning. "Bespectacled, short, and balding,
Calderón seems more a bookkeeper than a barnburner," Althaus
wrote. Calderón suffered through an awkward public appearance where
he was barely visible behind the wheel of a truck used as a campaign prop.
His speeches, noted James C. McKinley of the
New York Times
, "have all the dynamics of a NASCAR race, starting loud and
getting louder." López Obrador, by contrast, was a natural
orator.

The dynamics of the race shifted when Calderón began running
negative advertising that called López Obrador "a danger to
Mexico" (according to the British Broadcasting Corporation) and
likened his leftist rival to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.
Mexico's electoral commission ordered the suspension of the ads,
which were widely seen as unfair; López Obrador's fiscal
management of the nation's largest city had revealed few grounds
for scare attacks. But the ads had their desired effect. Calderón
filled out his conservative message with tough anticrime proposals
including a unified federal police force to replace Mexico's
patchwork of troubled regional authorities. But he also sought to
emphasize his moderate credentials. The title of his book
El hijo desobediente
(The Disobedient Son), issued during the campaign, referred not only to
his differences of attitude with his father, but also his independence
from Fox, often viewed as having been unable to deliver on his campaign
promises.

On July 2, 2006, Calderón took 35.89 percent of the vote to
López Obrador's 35.31 percent. The result was immediately
challenged, both within Mexico's election certification apparatus
and in the streets, where López Obrador's supporters
launched a semi-permanent protest encampment in the center of Mexico City.
A partial recount did little to change Calderón's margin of
victory, and after a hot debate that included a walkout by opposition
lawmakers prior to President Fox's annual
Informe
or state-of-the-union address, Calderón was certified as the
winner on September 5, 2006, for a six-year term running until 2012.

Calderón immediately offered an olive branch to his opponents,
whose continuing protests threatened Mexico's political stability.
Noting that the PAN was still a minority party in Mexico's
legislature, he told McKinley that "If you don't have a
majority, you have to construct it." He pledged to continue
Fox's efforts to oppose the strong immigration restrictions under
consideration in the United States, and he expressed a willingness to
include members of parties other than the PAN in his cabinet. Beyond
specific policy decisions, Mexico's immediate future seemed likely
to be influenced by the developing personality of its leader, who embodied
some of the country's old and conflicting impulses. "There
is an element in his persona that is rigid, belligerent, vertical, almost
authoritarian," newspaper editor and Calderón adviser Jorge
Zepeda Patterson told Schwartz. "But he has tried to work on those
defects."